New York By The Pound

IMAGE: “Judging the fruits of a community garden as part of the Park Farm Contest.” Courtesy of Parks Photo Archive, Neg. 16092. Photo by Max Ulrich, taken at Thomas Jefferson Park, Manhattan,
 on April 4, 1939. Despite the rise of rooftop and island...

Fascinating Stories About Semi-Skimmed Milk

IMAGE: An iconic example of the fictional book genre: J. R. Hartley’s Fly Fishing, invented to tug at our heartstrings in this Yellow Pages advert from the 1980s. A frail elderly man (left) calls several used-book dealers in vain, searching for a copy of Fly...

Domestication through Defecation

IMAGE: “Possible routes of development from Hunting-Collecting to other systems,” from Deforesting The Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis by Michael Williams, via Social Fiction. Click here for larger size. An important factor in the domestication...

Biofortified Humanoids

IMAGE: Red, yellow-green, and green pea aphids. Photo courtesy of Charles Hedgcock, R.B.P., via NPR. Over at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, an Edible Geography favourite, Jeremy links to a fascinating post about transgenic pea aphids. The pea aphid has been the...

The Amazing Allegorical Synthetic Fish

IMAGE: Rainbow trout, via. Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire popularised the ingenious idea that the biographies of plants provide us with a mirror in which we can see our own history, desires, and values. The triumph of corn, for example, tells us a wealth of...

Marmite Linguistics

Marmite, the brewing by-product turned British toast-topper, has turned up in a couple of interesting contexts lately due to its “Love it or hate it” ad campaign. Although the tagline was first used in 1996 (replacing “My Mate, Marmite”), it...